EIF Theatre Highlights: Joyce McMillan on the 2026 programme

Scotsman Theatre critic Joyce McMillan picks her highlights from the Edinburgh International Festival theatre programme

Angels in America As the USA celebrates its 250th birthday, the Edinburgh International Festival revives Ivo van Hove’s acclaimed 2008 production of Tony Kushner’s huge 1990s hit Angels In America, perhaps the most surreal and ambitious portrait of a nation ever to hit the stage. Subtitled “a gay fantasia on national themes”, Angels in America was inspired by the AIDS crisis of the late 20th century; but its dreams, visions and unforgettable human stories should offer an equally powerful insight into the troubled and divided America of the 2020s. King’s Theatre, 15-20 August.

HANG TIME First seen seen at the Flea Theatre, New York, in 2023, writer and director Zora Howard’s intense, Pulitzer-nominated one-hour drama uses the shocking image of an old-style southern lynching to explore the inner life of contemporary America. Three black men hang from an old, wide tree; and as they die, they shoot the breeze about the great loves and bitter disappointments that have shaped their lives, in a play that’s at once romantic, macabre, and darkly humorous. Lyceum Theatre, 20-23 August.

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Hostile American film culture has shaped imaginations across the world, over the last century; and in this family show, recommended for everyone aged eight and over, the French company Bakelite explore the plight of a spaghetti western cowboy stranded in the desert. Bakelite use all their famed skill in object theatre to create a full Western landscape of saloons and bandits, snakes and vultures, as the cowboy – played by company founder Olivier Rannou – tries to escape reality, with strange and dreamlike results. Church Hill Theatre, 8-11 August.

The Trial – after An Enemy of the People As America contemplates the impact of the Trump presidency, brilliant Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy turns her attention to Ibsen’s mighty 1882 drama An Enemy Of The People, about the politics of corruption, and the price paid by those who refuse accept it. Oscar nominated Brazilian actor Wagner Moura plays Ibsen’s stubborn scientist hero Stockmann, in a groundbreaking co-production with Edinburgh’s post-war sister festivals in Avignon and Holland, that will invite 11 audience members at every performance to become members of the jury at Stockmann’s trial. Lyceum Theatre, 7-10 August

Four Walls and a Roof The USA is a nation created and shaped by mass migration, and a generation of brilliant European artists and writers in flight from Nazism before and during the Second World War was one of most fascinating groups of migrants ever to arrive there. In Four Walls And A Roof, Berlin-based Lebanese theatre-makers Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroue reflect on Bertolt Brecht’s exile journey from Berlin to Hollywood, and on their own parallel journey from Beirut to Berlin, in a show that explores the experience of displacement, and on the own parallel quest for freedom that, throughout history, has driven artists to leave their homes in search of better conditions elsewhere. Studio Theatre, 14-17 August

The Edinburgh International Festival runs from 7-30 August

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